MRC Programme Award Renewal

July 13, 2018

Success in receiving an MRC Programme Grant provides core support in the Department of Medicine for two senior researchers, two research assistants and visiting international students.

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is found throughout the globe and in all socioeconomic groups. It persists for the lifetime of the host and infects up to 70% of adults in industrialised countries, and almost 100% in emerging countries. However, it may never cause symptoms as it can maintain its viral genome in the absence of infectious virus production. Consequently it is often unnoticed by healthy people and remains latent for the rest of a person’s life.

However, infections can become life-threatening for new-born infants or for people whose immune systems are compromised, such as those who are HIV-infected or have had an organ transplant. Symptoms can include vision loss, pneumonia, and inflammation of the colon, oesophagus, liver and brain. Clearly, for these individuals, eliminating latent infections would have wide-reaching benefits.

An MRC Programme Grant renewal that was awarded to Prof John Sinclair and Dr Mark Wills (their 6th consecutive programme grant from the MRC) will enable these researchers to understand how HCMV succeeds in maintaining itself as a latent infection, and how the breakdown of the relationship with the host causes disease. This will help them to improve methods of treating the virus and progress the design of a much needed vaccine. Such work is particularly important as there are therapies that currently target HCMV replication, but they do not affect the latent virus.